Zork

Jeff Pack, Brown University
'99 (English 112, 1996)

In the "digerary canon" of computer games, a place of honor
must be reserved for Zork. (Of course, its selection, like any good
work, is controversial, in that Zork can be said to be an outgrowth
of Adventure and the like. Nevertheless, Zork popularized
the genre of "text" adventures, and it was through Zork
on my Apple II that I first encountered them.)
The concept behind Zork was one of "interactive fiction":
the player became the hero of a story, controlling his actions through
parsed verbal input. After every action, the player would be "rewarded"
with some text explaining the result of his/her action (or, if the player's
input didn't make sense to the parser, an error message). Zork,
in spirit, was an early hypertext novel, though it didn't utilize the now-conventional
link.

Infocom (the producers of Zork) went on to produce many
more works of "interactive fiction" in many different genres:
mysteries (Deadline, The Witness), science fiction (Planetfall,
Starcross), fantasy (Enchanter, Wishbringer), etc. Infocom even
adapted books into the form, producing a text-adventure
version of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as
well as adaptations of Shogun and Sherlock Holmes. Each work
placed the player into the shoes (or the equivalent; A Mind Forever
Voyaging casted the player as "PRISM", an artifically intelligent
computer) of the protagonist, placed him at the beginning of the chain
of events, and from there let the player fend for him or herself. The stories
weren't really that diverse - the storylines consisted of a single optimal
ending and several "dead endings" in which the hero dies, is
arrested, or otherwise fails in his/her quest. Of course, Infocom's software
was marketed as games rather than electronic fiction, so it could be argued
that this form was adopted to appeal to its target audience.

Unfortunately, Infocom is for all intents and purposes dead. Though
games are still produced under its name (Return
to Zork, for example - an attempt to modernize the Zork
universe), it no longer produces "traditional" interactive fiction.
A few freelance authors carry on the tradition, but text-based adventures
have been by and large replaced by more graphically
intensive games.